


The Bed's Too Big Without You

by blythechild



Series: Hurt/Comfort Bingo [2]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Arguing, Couch Cuddles, Developing Relationship, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Late Night Conversations, Relationship Problems, Reveal, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 21:28:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2165859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid and Prentiss have a relationship-ending fight about the state of their union. Prentiss leaves, but ends up sneaking back in the night only to discover that Reid isn't where he's supposed to be.</p><p> </p><p>This is a work of fanfiction and as such I do not claim ownership over the characters herein. It was created as a personal entertainment. This story contains adult and suggestive situations and should not be read by those under the age of 18.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bed's Too Big Without You

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: this story is just unrepentant relationship schmoop. Seriously, this might be a bit dodgy...

**_I’ve never been so foolish in my young life, I swear, or done one thing that I’ve regretted more, than going from you last night and leaving you alone._**  
\-- Sulpicia, Roman poet of the 1st century B.C.E.

 

\------

“Emily, don’t do this.” He reached for her but she was quicker, dodging his grip as she left the bed.

“Do what?” Her look was all innocence as she began to dress and something in him snapped, brutally and irrevocably. He suddenly felt that he was out there all alone, naked in the changeable weather of her mood, as if he’d been making love to a mirage.

“It’s just running away! Don’t you see that?”

“Why are you angry with me?”

“Because you only give me slivers of you, and only here. I’ve adjusted to live on this starvation diet of desire that _you_ have orchestrated but you can’t even maintain it for a whole night, can you? Do you even want to be here anymore? I could never just get up and walk away after being with you like this.” His hand waved over the wreck that they’d made of the bed. “But you can’t wait to get out of here, can you?”

She stopped dressing. Her stare hardened, he could feel it even in the dark, and he heard her breathe deeply and then let it go. “This isn’t about you, Spencer.”

He laughed loudly with a crazy manic lilt. “Not _about_ me? How, exactly, is this not about me? How can you give yourself to me, over and over for months, but you won’t let me hold you? How can you spend more nights here than in your own apartment, but you never spend the whole night with me? How can you be so raw with me and then deny who we are in daylight? How is avoiding any of these questions _not_ supposed to lead back to me?!”

“Don’t push me.” She warned. “You don’t get to set the timetable about when I’m ready to make decisions about this.”

“But you can set the timetable for both of us. Right?”

“C’mon, Spence…”

“Give me something, Emily.” He rose up on his knees like someone at prayer, and maybe he was. “Give me a reason to put up with this… tell me that we’re doing more here than just fucking.”

The word sounded horrible and sliced his mouth before it escaped. He’d never ‘just fucked’ anyone, and he would never consider ‘fucking’ Emily Prentiss. She jerked a little in the dark and it gave him hope that she would never ‘just fuck’ him either.

“Emily,” His voice softened, pleading. “I’m crazy for you - probably legitimately, clinically altered by what I feel. I want you, all the time, and I want to be _with_ you, out in the open, for real. I want us to make decisions together, to know that whatever we choose, we have considered each other’s happiness before choosing it.”

She was still for so long in the dark that he almost got up to make sure that she was all right. “I can’t give you that.”

“Why?” This time he did get up, snapping the sheet away from him angrily as he stalked over to her.

“You think that thrashing around a bed on and off for a couple of months is some sort of ‘proof’ that we can have something lasting? You want me to declare _something_ , to unleash all of these intense emotions - you want me to risk everything when we might not even make it through this conversation!” She collected up the rest of her clothes, things that she didn’t need to put on in order to make her escape from him. “You cannot be this naïve, Spencer. This shoe was always going to drop… why make it any harder than it has to be?”

He stumbled back a step and the movement stopped her in her tracks. His hand rose to rub his forehead roughly. He felt nauseated and short of breath and there was a sudden, terrible pounding in his throat and head that made him feel as though passing out might be a genuine alternative to this moment. 

“Well…” He choked as his stomach heaved and he had to swallow hard to keep from losing what little dignity he had left. “Since you’ve already decided our chances… I-I guess that I’m wasting my time putting this much fight into it.”

She reached out for him tentatively, a few unsure fingers hanging in the shadows just beyond him. “I love the way you fight…” 

Her voice shook but all he heard was her ‘goodbye’. She’d awoken him from his solitude, made him bare himself fearlessly under her sun, and now she was content to leave him there with no worry for how he’d manage to warm himself again when she was gone. He batted her hand away and collapsed back to sit heavily on the edge of the bed.

“What’s the damned point.” He growled and buried his head in his hands.

“Spencer…” Her whisper was a threadbare cloth trying to wrap itself around him with no hope of staving off his chill.

“Go.” He snapped, still not looking at her. “That’s what you wanted. I won’t make the mistake of demanding more from you.”

He heard her huff in the dark above him. It was her angry, pre-explosion huff - he knew it well. Despite being very compatible friends, they turned out to be a lot more volatile as lovers. It surprised him in the beginning; he knew that Prentiss was passionate and held it in check most of the time, but she also seemed to tap into a previously unknown vein of it within him as well. He was shocked by the challenge of her, the need to battle, and how satisfying he found it. Maybe she was right - maybe this was never going to work in the long run.

He expected some provocative statement from her, something to jumpstart the conversation again, but she didn’t. She just said ‘Right’, carving out the syllable crisply, and then he heard her turn and walk out of the room. A few seconds later, the front door slammed so hard that things in his living room clinked from the vibration. He just sat there with his head still in his hands and tried to breathe through it. The shaking started in earnest thirty seconds after that and he just let it have its way with him. He didn’t have the energy to fight for anything anymore.

\-----

She had to pull off to the side of the road because she couldn’t see through the glare that her tears were giving to the oncoming traffic.

Shit. _Shitshitshitshit._

She’d made a lot of questionable decisions in her adult life, but she’d _really_ fucked up this time and she knew it. She knew it the moment she’d told him that she expected them to fail. She wanted the words back, and maybe there was a way that she could’ve achieved that, but she let them hang there and mentally beat the crap out of the man she loved instead.

Loved.

It was a hell of a lot more than fucking and she’d wanted to say that to him, but she was afraid because the indomitable Emily Prentiss is tough in all of the wrong moments. God, even the first time, when his fingers brushed over an old bullet wound on her hip… There had been an evening with too much tequila and a weird, giggly game of ‘show me your scars’. He had a surprising amount and her mind had suddenly stuttered _He’s actually pretty badass, isn’t he?_ She hadn’t expected to kiss him and she really hadn’t expected him to kiss her back. And that was her problem right there: she hadn’t planned for any of it and Emily was an awful mess without a plan. 

He’d looked to her and thought that she knew what she was doing with them because _she_ had more experience than he did. She should have pointed out that excessive experience with failure doesn’t necessarily translate into a greater understanding of something; he may have had fewer lovers, but he was far better at loving than she was. But now he thought that she’d anticipated this all along (because she had a plan, right?) and he was just some fool who’d mistaken lust for something more.

Except she’d fallen _hard_ that first night. A drunken, messy, desperate night - yes - but when he’d moved in her, holding her so close that she found bruises the next day, watching her intensely as she came, soothing her down afterwards with his hands and the most ecstatic expression of joy she’d ever witnessed… Jesus, if she’d actually fallen, she’d have left a crater where she landed. 

It wasn’t the booze or the frustration needing a convenient outlet - she’d done that enough times, she knew what it felt like. He’d unintentionally invited this hidden, ignored part of her out for the evening, and she’d let it happen without hesitation. And more than that, he didn’t bat an eyelash at the incongruity of her. He just folded it into all of the details that he knew about his friend - he treated every aspect of her with equal weight. Even when she got up to leave before dawn and he walked her to the door, he didn’t look at her as some newly uncovered mystery, he saw _her_ , now more fully. It was the only night that he hadn’t ask her to stay, probably because he didn’t know if he should or not, but his expression told her that he’d never forget and she found that she suddenly craved the idea of them knowing each other this way. She already loved him for the way he saw her. And tonight he’d said that he wanted all of that, for real, and for the foreseeable future. But all she could do was hide her fear of failure and inadequacy behind a battering ram of pessimism, and tell him that _he_ was the problem.

She gagged so hard that she swung the driver’s side door open and leaned out in case she completely lost her cool. She breathed in ragged, wet gulps of evening air, letting the headlights of the passing cars wash over her, their soft whoosh as they sped by making her feel wonderfully unimportant. _You have to get a grip_ , she imagined them saying, _You’re just making choices with imperfect clarity - like choosing the backstreets instead of an expressway. We’re all just trying to get somewhere. Where do you want to go tonight?_

She scrubbed the tears from her cheeks and took a deep breath, holding it with closed eyes until she saw little pale motes in the corners of her vision. He sat there, painted across the darkness of her eyelids, head in his hands, having given up on the fight. 

She _loved_ the fight in him…

Prentiss opened her eyes and let out her breath. She slammed the car door shut, revved the engine, and made a dangerous U-turn back onto the road. They were all just trying to get somewhere, and she’d lost her way.

\-----

She let herself in quietly with her key. The apartment was dark and still, and a part of her was disappointed that there weren’t any signs of unrest. Maybe he just went to sleep. She shook her head and told herself to grow the fuck up as she toed off her shoes and socks, and went to the bedroom. The room was empty, the tangle of sheets highlighted in the moonlight from the windows, but he wasn’t there. She turned, momentarily confused. Did he leave? Did he go to her place looking for her? Then she saw the darker shape in the shadows of the living room - there wasn’t much light to be had but she saw a man-sized lump on the couch. She walked gingerly across the floorboards, the place was ancient and had a voice of its own, and as she stood by the couch she saw that he was asleep. 

Reid could sleep like no one else; he fell into deep unconsciousness at the drop of a hat, and could rouse himself to full alertness just as quickly. It was a skill that she envied during many a case. He could power nap almost anywhere, in any position, and then be right back in the game when he needed to be. It probably did a lot to preserve his sanity. He had nightmares just like the rest of them, but somewhere along the way, his body had made the choice to supercede his guilt, anxieties, and fears in favor of recharging itself. He once told her that sometimes he napped so hard that it took him a moment to realize that he hadn’t awoken in an alternate dimension. She laughed when he said it but often imagined him being busy in other universes, being other Reids, while he slept. She looked on him now and wondered where he was…

“Spencer.” She whispered, but he didn’t move. “Spence?”

Maybe there weren’t any Prentisses wherever he was. She suddenly wanted him back with her. She didn’t want him to be out there on his own, even if he was on an adventure. Maybe she just didn’t want to be alone _here_. She crawled over him and slotted herself with her back against the sofa cushions, one hand propping her up as she leaned over his hips so that she could see his face.

“Spencer.” She tried again and this time he moved. His breathing changed as he turned into the couch, closer to her.

“Em’ly?” He mumbled as he stretched. It warmed her because his sleepy tone always reminded her of a boy trying to find his way home, hopeful that he may have found it at last.

“Hey.” She leaned forward and kissed him because she couldn’t stop herself. He gasped under her lips and didn’t respond, just let her do what she wanted. She should have expected that - he thought they were finished, and it was further proof that even while half asleep, Spencer Reid wasn’t anyone’s fool. “Why are you on the couch?”

He sighed under her; she felt his breath against her cheek. “It smells like us in there and I don’t have any other clean sheets. But I also don’t have the energy to do laundry at two in the morning.”

She felt a terrible, sharp seizing under her ribs on her left side and she gasped, straightening to lean against the back of the couch until it passed. He just lay beneath her and didn’t move. He didn’t touch her or turn to invite her into him - he just stared.

“Why are you here, Emily?”

“You know, whenever I leave here to go home, I never sleep when I get there. I can’t. The bed’s too big without you - it never feels right. I haven’t slept in that bed for months now…” It came out a little airy and she realized that she wasn’t breathing, so she took a huge gulp and tried to settle herself. 

“I’m sorry, Spencer, I’m so, so sorry… I’m in pretty deep here and I’m afraid and when I get afraid I just turn into a huge jerk and that’s probably all that you’ve seen of me for the last few months and that’s _really_ not how I feel and every time we have this argument I say something to make it all irrevocably worse and I just stand by and watch myself chip away at something that I desperately want to keep whole and I _can’t_ stop it but all I want is to stop fucking this up… please, God, help me stop rambling, just STOP me or I’m gonna lose it…”

His hands landed on her face, probably feeling the dampness on her cheeks, and he pulled her down on top of him as he shushed her. One hand went further up and pressed her head into his chest. It began stroking her hair in long, slow pulls as his lips settled on the top of her head.

“Deep breaths, Em. Just catch your breath… I need you to make a little more sense than this and I’m sure that requires oxygen…”

She smiled into his bare chest and did as she was told for once. Her body slowly relaxed into his; he shuffled so that she could stretch out along him, his legs wrapping around hers as their hips settled into one another.

“Better?” He whispered after a few minutes.

She nodded into him as her hands clutched at his arms, feeling the muscles move as he continued to stroke her hair. “I love you, and I know that you have absolutely _no idea_ that I do…” She said it so softly that she was sure that he hadn’t heard it. He shifted under her and she turned her head to find him staring at her, confused, in the dark.

“You had me from that first night.” She ducked her eyes away from him, afraid of what his reaction would be. “I thought that it would spook you for sure, so I played it down. I mean, who falls so quickly like that? It was impossible and I felt ridiculous…”

“But, Em-”

“And, you know, you just assumed that I knew what I was doing, that I knew how to handle this.” She steamrolled right over him. “But I’ve _failed_ at every relationship I’ve been in, Spence. I don’t know the first thing about them.”

She had to make him understand how neurotic this relationship had made her. Sex was easy but _this_ was hard - almost impossible, really, and yet a frightened part of her had been stretching out for it from day one. She didn’t see him as some mild-mannered nerd, or some sexless co-worker. He was the guy that made her mind spit out words like ‘commitment’ and ‘forever’ when she was least expecting them, and she was afraid of what her mind would do to her if she admitted that and they _still_ failed. Her fingers curled into his chest hard enough to leave marks, but she had to give her desperation a voice even if it was a small one.

“How was I supposed to tell you that I’m bad at these things and somehow convince you to stick with me because I’m nuts about you in a way that would completely nullify the collected, controlled woman that you’ve always known? What if you didn’t like that when you finally saw it?”

He reached for her and tried to interrupt, but she caught his hand and pinned it to his body, squeezing her eyes shut as she pushed through the rest. 

“How do I tell you that I’m holding onto my professional reserve by my fingernails because I want to go into the office every day and tell someone that I’m with this weird, fantastic guy who makes me want things that I’ve never considered before? I want to tell someone - anyone - how frightened you’ve made me. I want to ask for help… God, what I wouldn’t give to have had a little ‘girl’ advice from J.J or Garcia over the last few months!”

She opened her eyes and saw his shocked expression plainly in the shadows of the room. His eyes wide, his mouth agape in disbelief - _this_ had been the face of what she feared from him. Maybe he’d never really seen her clearly at all.

“How do I convince you that _it’s not just sex_ when the limits that our lives have placed on this relationship means that that’s all I can give you?” She whispered because her voice was starting to crack. “I want to give you everything, Spence…”

His hands broke her grip and cupped her face bringing her roughly to his lips. She gasped and he moaned as he tasted her tongue. One hand slid into her hair, holding her tightly, and the other moved down her back and pressed her into him as he adjusted to cradle her body. _God, it’s obscene how good that feels… like coming home…_ Her hand skimmed up his arm until it met the edge of his jaw. His pulse thumped under her palm at his neck and she sighed, almost delirious at the discovery, as he groaned into her mouth again.

He pulled his lips from hers abruptly and gusted a harsh breath against her cheek. “Why would you go through all of this? Why not just say something? I’m a giant nerd - do you really think that I wouldn’t understand insecurity?” Next, he pulled back and fixed her with a hard look that he usually reserved for interrogations. “Did you honestly believe that seeing your doubt or fragility would so radically change how I felt about you? It’s your vulnerability that I love, Emily - the way it buts up against your bravado. It’s your humanity that thrums under all of those crazy scars that keeps drawing me back to you.”

She blinked and felt herself go hot all over with shame. “When you put it like that, you make me sound like an idiot.”

“Newsflash, Agent Prentiss: you are. You’ve acted exactly like an idiot.”

“Okay, okay… I get it…” She smiled and tried to hide it by burying her face into his chest. “So, what do we do about this?”

“Well,” He reached down and tilted her face to look up at him, flush be damned. “You stay tonight. All night.”

“Yes.” She breathed. “There’s not much left of it, but alright.”

“Regardless,” He slipped his hand into her hair brushing it away from her face as she closed her eyes and leaned into the touch. “You stay. You let me take you back to that bed that’s no good without you.”

“And?”

“And,” His fingers then traveled, outlining her neck until she arched into them. “You tell me what you want, because I want to give you everything too, Emily.”

“The bed maybe too far…” She murmured.

“Location is just a detail.” He pressed his hips up into hers and she became convinced that they would never make it to the bedroom. “I’m flexible in that regard.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, you and I talk about what we _really_ want - not just what we think we can manage. And we make some decisions about that - together. But I’ll tell you one thing that I won’t budge on…”

“What’s that?”

“I’m done with hiding this. Loving you is something I want to show off.”

 _Christ, does he have any idea what sort of effect his words have? He must… Surely he heard that impact as she landed in yet another crater of his making…_

“That’s going to cause a lot of trouble. Our careers, the team, HR, Hotch… oh jesus, _Hotch_ …”

“So be it. This is what I’m in it for, Emily: you. We’re going to work everything else around us. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” She pulled herself up along his chest and then kissed him until they both had to come up for air. “I love the way you fight for things, Spence…” She whispered into his mouth. “It fills me with a frightening amount of hope.”

“It’s an old fashioned notion.” He smiled and she felt one of his hands skim low on her back, edging just inside the waist of her pants. “I’m sure that someone’s invented a pill to prevent it by now.”

“I _need_ that fight.” She sank into his mouth, going deep when he gave himself over to her. His arms wrapped around her and rolled them to the side so that her back was against the sofa cushions. His legs looped around hers and pulled her flush against him as if she were caught in a web of his reach. When they separated for an instant, breathing hard and clasping tightly to one another, his mouth shaped the words ‘I know’. Of course he did, and he just folded that into the ever-growing list of things that he was discovering about Emily Prentiss. He _saw_ her. He _wanted_ her, even as she kept changing. How lucky was she that he was too stubborn to give up?

She struggled out of her clothes and pressed herself into him, to get as close as she could, to give him all of her. She wanted to leave so vivid an imprint of herself on his body that he’d remember it when sleep took him away from her. She was through being coy about how she felt - she was pretty sure that you didn’t get too many chances at something like this. When she came, tangled around him, breathing his breath, she saw that look of joy on his face that she’d seen on their first night together. It made her laugh, shaking her right down to her toes. It took her a few minutes to explain what it all meant to him, but when she did, he smiled brilliantly in the dark. He said her name with that sleepy tone as he curled their bodies further into the couch, and she realized that they’d both simultaneously found their way home at the same time.

\----

He brought her coffee. She made him eat vegetables. They tended to finish each other’s sentences in meetings, and they often made obscure references that the other would nod at silently as if saying ‘ahh, yes - I should have thought of that’. Her hands lingered when she helped him into his Kevlar, and his eyes always sought her out first after a standoff or a takedown. They fought like dogs when they disagreed about profile elements, and they curled up like cats when a case drained everything from them. She’d perch on his desk as the team stood around discussing the weekend, their legs brushing slightly as if it were nothing. He’d rest his hand along her shoulder as he bent to look at something on her computer screen. 

Everyone noticed but no one said a damned word about it.

When Hotch took them aside and asked how serious it was, they just looked at each other and he sighed at whatever he read in their expressions. He told them that if their living arrangements had changed, they should notify HR about it, and he left it at that. J.J. caught Prentiss in the ladies room one day and asked what Reid was to her now, and all she said was ‘Home’. Morgan stopped offering to drive Reid to work because he knew that there was no longer any need. When Rossi gave out invitations to his famous dinners, he stopped suggesting that Reid and Prentiss should bring dates along. 

“It was all much easier than I thought it would be.” She mentioned months later as she watched him get ready for bed. “It makes me wish that we’d done it sooner.”

“We had to get there at our own speed.” He murmured as he turned out the light and pulled her into his chest with a sigh. “We weren’t ready for each other at the same time. And I think that the team _still_ isn’t prepared for us, but the difference there is that we don’t really care about their readiness.”

“You think that they aren’t dealing with it?”

“Does it really matter if they are?” He whispered into her hair. “When it comes to _this_ , your opinion and mine are the only ones that count.”

She thought about that for a while in the darkness as she listened to him breathe. “You’re a lot stronger than people generally give you credit for. It must be a part of that unfashionable hope thing you have…”

His chest moved against her cheek as he chuckled, but when he spoke he was just a sleepy little boy again. “Go to sleep, Em.”

“Will I be there? In that alternate dimension that you visit tonight?”

“You’re always there.” His arms tightened but his words slurred a little. He was already halfway gone. “You are where I’m going, Em’ly…”

She wasn’t certain about that, but she’d be there when he came back to the bed - the life - that only worked because they were in it together.

**Author's Note:**

> This story came from a reader prompt: _After a big fight, Reid sleeps on the couch, and in the middle of the_  
>  _night, Prentiss comes to sleep on the couch with him because she can't sleep without him._
> 
> The title is stolen from a song by The Police.


End file.
